IRINGA, Tanzania — Over a week ago six welding students from Chico left on an adventure in Africa, planning to help drill a couple of water wells and teach skills.

But in the intervening days these bright teenagers have come to realize happiness can thrive in the midst of squalor and poverty.

Chico High School seniors Emily Nava, Danney Meyer, Antonio Piceno, junior Chase Thompson and Gage Berge and Allen Hart of Butte College, are all current or former students of welding instructor Ronnie Cockrell.

They started on the path that led them to Africa in January when they helped construct a drilling rig that was part of a project headed by Chico attorney Ron Reed. He and others have the rigs built and shipped to Tanzania where they are used by trained locals to dig desperately needed drinking water wells.

With the help of some aggressive fundraising the students got the opportunity to take the rig they built to Africa and see it work.

On Wednesday the seven including Cockrell, gathered in a Lutheran Church in Iringa that had Internet access for a live face-to-face interview with the Enterprise-Record over the web.

In the 40-minute interview the most common word the students used was “shocked.” The youngsters, two of whom had never been on a plane before leaving for Africa, almost instantly developed a new appreciation for what they take for granted at home.

Meyer said the living conditions, where “everything, from getting your next meal, to boiling water so you have water that is OK to drink” is a daily struggle, came as a shock to all of the students.

“I don’t want to overuse the word shocking, but that’s really what it is,” said Thompson during the Internet interview.

He said it is “mind blowing” to see so many people dealing with grinding poverty, who are “still able to put a smile on their face and go along with their day.”

Thompson said, “I have noticed that they don’t have much and they are still happy. We don’t need everything we have back in the states to be happy. They don’t need it so why should we?”

Nava said the exposure to an entirely different culture can be both “scary” and “really good.”

She explained that just the night before the interview, an American Peace Corps volunteer led them to a “restaurant,”

Cockrell explained “Mama’s chapatis” was a table and a couple of benches in a garbage-strewn, apparently abandoned warehouse. Mama cooked “chapatis” over an open fire on the same table where the customers sat.

Nava explained the chapatis are “kind of like a tortilla, but it is thicker and chewier. Mama shared the warehouse with several other food vendors and about “5 billion flies,” according to Cockrell. Nava interjected the fly comment “will freak out my Mom.”

“In Chico, if we saw a place like that, we would turn the other way, like immediately. None of us would ever sit down there because it would be scary,” explained Nava. In Tanzania they sat, and they ate.

“It was so worth it. We are going again” said Nava, explaining they were planning to have breakfast there Thanksgiving morning.

Cockrell said from the academic side of the ledger, his students have been involved in drilling two wells. So far neither has hit water, but they think they are close.

Besides drilling, “All the students today were able to weld up six good bits on broken pipe, and we were able to fix broken pipe” as well as make couplers that will make it possible to connect lengths of pipe.

The teens also have met a congenial, friendly people.

“They always greet you first,” said Nava, “They say, ‘Welcome.’ They ask you how your day was. They are really friendly.”

Making long-distance friends though isn’t a real option.

“I don’t think there is even a possibility of that happening,” said Meyer. He explained that email and Internet access is for the most part an impossible dream for Tanzanian teens. Even something as mundane as a postal mail pen pal is out of the question.

“It costs money to send mail and it costs more money to send it to a different continent,” and money for stamps is a luxury the kids can’t afford, according to Nava.

Near the end of the online interview Cockrell brought Castor F. Sanguya into the range of the computer camera, explaining he wanted to introduce him to Chico.

Sanguya is the director of the Kilolo Star Vocational School, that Chico attorney Reed helped establish, and was the guide and translator for the Chico High group.

In somewhat broken English, Sanguya took a few minutes to thank Chico for sending the children to Tanzania. He thanked the parents “to allow their children to travel for such a long distance to here.”

“We thank you all for this thing you have done,” he said, and then invited Cockrell to bring more of his students back in the future.

The Chico team is due back Nov. 27.

Staff writer Roger H. Aylworth can be reached at 896-7762, raylworth@chicoer.com, or on Twitter @RogerAylworth.